On Dataists, a new collaborative blog for data hackers that I’m contributing to, we’ve just announced a data contest that’s custom made for R users. To win the contest, you need to build a recommendation system for R packages.

To find out more, check out the official announcement on Dataists. Then go to GitHub to get the data sets we’re providing, including the official training data set that you should use to build your model. We’re even providing you with a baseline model to get you started.

On Sunday, the contest will officially go live on Kaggle, where you’ll want to make submissions to see how your recommendation algorithm compares with other contestants’ submissions. In February 2011, the contest will end and the team with the best system will win three UseR! books of their choosing.